PARALLEL DATA LAB 

PDL Abstract

Tag, You Can See It! Using Tags for Access Control in Photo Sharing

CHI 2012: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, May 2011.

Peter F. Klemperer, Yuan Liang, Michelle L. Mazurek, Manya Sleeper, Blase Ur, Lujo Bauer, Lorrie Faith Cranor, Nitin Gupta, and Michael K. Reiter*

Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

*University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC

http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/

Users often have rich and complex photo-sharing preferences, but properly configuring access control can be difficult and time-consuming. In an 18-participant laboratory study, we explore whether the keywords and captions with which users tag their photos can be used to help users more intuitively create and maintain access-control policies. We find that (a) tags created for organizational purposes can be repurposed to create efficient and reasonably accurate access-control rules; (b) users tagging with access control in mind develop coherent strategies that lead to significantly more accurate rules than those associated with organizational tags alone; and (c) participants can understand and actively engage with the concept of tag-based access control.

KEYWORDS: Access control; human factors; tagging; privacy

FULL TR: pdf